paul stamets is saving the world in six different ways

It used to be just four:

1)  if we get a biological attack, paul stamets has ways of saving us.  He joked about how saving old growth forests is now a matter of national defense! 

2)  cure for cancer.

3)  toxic site detox.

4)  keeping carpenter ants or termites from destroying your home without toxic gick.

And now two more:

5)  a detox mushroom that converted an area from too toxic for use to safe.  (but this might just be more of variation on number 1)

possible #6 )  mushrooms that give off a gas that can be used as fuel

possible #6)  seeds woven into cardboard.  So you get a box and throw the box on your lawn and later come back to find a lovely garden.

Ahhh, here it is ....  6)  Cure for TB.

Always amazing to hear him speak.  What a superhero.

From hearing Paul Stamets talk, the mushroom used to cure tuberculosis, the agarikon, is more amazing than *just* a cure. It can cure even the anti-biotic resistant strain of TB, which is the very real, very scary TB danger these days.

Additionally, the agarikon (read more about it and others in this Stamets article) only grows in old growth forests. So saving this wonder medicine is another compelling reason to preserve shrinking old growth forest habitat.

NO, NO, NO!

Kill off all the forests, kill off all the mushrooms, kill off all the other plants, kill off all the animals, kill the soil and let it all blow and wash away, and contaminate everything else.

I was a passenger in a car yesterday, which gave me a rare chance to look at the scenery.  I was noticing how Washington State clearcuts entire hills, top to bottom, no matter how steep the hillside.  Lakes and ponds are often ringed with thick coats of algae from excess farming nitrogen and phosphorus and manure runoff.  They log off everything and leave thin little trees that blow over in the next good wind.  Eventually someone pulls up the stumps and burns them.  Or not -- there are an awful lot of stump farms around here.  The larger rivers used to be waterways for ships, but not anymore because all the logging caused them to fill with silt.

All the loggers hate the spotted owl.  They don't think beyond cutting down the trees and dragging them off and collecting their money.

A cure for cancer?  A cure for TB? Why should they bother about that?  Why look ahead?

Sue

Sue,

I think you should look into decaf. 

Perhaps a route to improvement is to demonstrate a better way. 

cynical me is immediatly put off by the term detox. which has no real scientific definition and is associated with gobs of pseudoscienctific claims and scams.....its a term like 'natural' completley at the discretion of the user as to its definition. honestly the term 'toxic' is similiar. what makes something toxic? some things are good for you in small amounts and bad for you in large amounts....are they toxic?  most drugs and likely these "cures" are probably a perfect example of toxic cures. new drugs are money makers! why wouldn't the big drug companies want these things to distill into powerful pills to be supplied by the masses? do they really think tb johnny would rather try and grow a shroom in his backyard and they wouldn't have a monopoly?

preserving the diversity of the worlds plants and animals is one of the most important ecological routes to human preservation. tons of new drugs are out there waiting to be developed.

Um, you know, pointing out the destruction, pointing out the frustrations with certain terms, pointing out the potential barriers to natural methods and remedies is not really the direction Paul (W.) was trying to take. I understand the frustration, because I, too, have huge chips on my shoulder about certain supposedly "modern" ways. But ya know, I think both Paul W. and Paul Stamets are trying to side-step that stuff and make a difference in a positive way.

Listening to Paul Stamets last weekend was all about "isn't this cool." "Look at what is available to us in nature!" "Look at how the natives used this..." "this is a way to cure something without side effects..."

I mentioned his talk to an acupuncturist friend of mine and she said, oh, I use one of Paul Stamets' tinctures and I think it helped me avoid getting the flu everyone around me was getting! Simple, yet positive and effective.

I guess I'm trying to say that there can be bonding that happens over commiserating, but then too much commiserating can be detracting and counter-productive. And this thread was intended to be something the opposite of commiserating.

I wish I knew more in this space to adequately reply to Paul W. about how mushrooms can save the world. I am in the very baby-steps of learning some of this stuff and can really only relate my new perspectives, anecdotes and what it was like to hear Stamets speak.

There was a very large audience for Paul Stamets' lecture. They frequently interrupted his lecture with spontaneous applause and then gave him a standing ovation at the end. He is positive. He is making a difference, and there are amazing factoids in all of his research and knowledge that he is generously sharing with the world. How utterly cool is that?

Since there weren't any links  , I had to look him up all by myself.

IT'S THE FUNGI PERFECTI GUY!  And nobody here thought to mention that fact.

Sue, who doesn't need no stinkin' decaf!

the shroomer.

your right jocelyn, I just want everyone to keep their thinking caps on no matter who is delivering the information. the gist is that there are many answers to the worlds problems just waiting to be discovered in the natural world and that is really cool!

I recently placed an order for way more than I should have spent with Fungi Perfecti, all with that wonderful feeling that the money was going to something worthwhile.  If you all haven't made a mushroom log at least once in your life, do it this summer!  They're so fun.  Best holiday presents EVER!

Ryan

one time a girl from canada sent me a cloth grocer bag and the tag had wild flower seeds in it..you toss it in the yard ..garden..and wild flower seeds would grow..that would be a great idea for clothing mfgrs.

I think their stuff about lawn fertilization is very interesting.

And I once put some of their garden spores stuff in some hay mulch and it REALLY went to town!  I saw some of the biggest earthworms ever!

    What about stamets baby trees, hemlock if i remember right being nursed by fungi, saplings growing in dark bits of wood, were it should be to dark to grow but surviving because  because mushroom mycelium brings them water and nutrients, even from quite some distance i think it was. I should look that up again before mentioning it i am not sure of the details. Great! complex, living interactions in the soil.
    Or that mycelium really help plants grow because they are better at picking up nutrients than plants are but not so good at making them, so they interchange goodies. Plants make extra food to use for interchanges.
      First i heard that some plants have or can have micorrhizae, special fungi growing on their roots, i heard that you could buy evergreen oaks  inoculated with trufa and get crops of trufas growing and then that micorrizae helped plants grow and then i looked them up and read that at first they imagined only a few plants paired up with fungi and later they found nearly all plants do.

      I once read about a woman who cordoned off spoilt bits of ground to study what grew in them because she was into saying how great the earth is a finding new ways out. I only heard about her briefly but i think she influenced me a lot, sometimes the title of a book inflences me a lot.
    Of course i have seen ground that is not producing anything, ground with no answers left, at least for the time being but i like to think of the answers. I find science really exciting, i love knowing all the things that are more complex and magic than you expected them to be.

  If you tap in "pearls before slime" you can read about bacteria enclosing uranium in safer and more stable heme molecules. bioremediation.

  Sue Munroe, really i think its a great thought that events in "the grapes of wrath" need not have happened if they had known how to look after soils. I have not read it, i read another of his books. The thing is goverments should be teaching the farmers. You should kill the goverment.

  One reason i write here is to annoy the spanish and push them into doing something about overgrazing or into being more aware and spreading the knowledge of their oldfashioned but maybe really valuable tree using tradition. You could just write and tell the chinese how usless the american farmers are, maybe that will move the farmers, or write it to the europeans, who do the americans most mind looking small in front of?  also think Spanish the tree farming tradition is usefull for others for the world I want  to spread the news and i write on an american blog because that jon stewart has made me america crazy.

Brenda i am really scared of religiouse people, if ordinary people defend their jobs or just that they should be the only ones in the market place, tooth and nail, they are scary but not as scary and rough , as religiouse people who really think they are saving your soul or something, they really go in for what i think is termed mental cruely. I think i need about so tremendously many years before daring to mention religion again or talk to anyone with any sort of religiouse enthusiasm after my last ten or fifteen years bumping into violent religious idealist after idealist, and they all pretend to be different. agri rose macaskie.

Leah sattler, Paul Stamets does not just find out that something works, he then looks at it under the microscope and proves that it works and how.
  This is the scientific stuff he talks of related to detox. Mushrooms, toad stool, etc. undo molecules, so do we, in our cases the digestion is in our stomachs, in theirs they treat, wood say to acids and enzymes after, in one case pumping them full of water, without ingesting them first and only ingest them when they have reduced them, so they do digestion outside their bodies.

        Well, to mention one case of detox, Paul Stamets says that oyster mushrooms, undo, dissolve or whatever, bonds between hydrogen and carbon in carbohydrates, bread for example  and so why not get them to do the same with petrol a hydro carborate. They did and in a competition to clean soil between bio nerds filling the petrol filled earth with bacteria and some other nerds, it was Paul Stamets who won, he put oyster mushrooms to work on the petrol soaked soil and his fungi really turned petrol filled earth into beautiful top soil covered with mushrooms, that then died, which the insects then came and ate, which insects the birds came and ate, leaving plants seeds behind, so the earth then bloomed with plants.
      Put Paul Stamets name in youtube and you can find several videos of this happening. Read his book and you can find out how to make fungal mats which will clean soils air etc. He writes well, its a very  easy read.

  He trains strains of fungi which will dissolve molecules that are difficult to break down herbicides pesticides and nerve gasses.
      He puts the fungi he thinks might do the job in  a petri dish in a soup they eat, a sort of water sugar affair with a bit of salt in it to stop it going off, as far as i can make out and he adds a little of the  poisonous substance he wants them to degrade, clean up, digest which means whose molecules he wants the fungi to reduce to their components parts, in some cases, maybe you can just change them to other molecules different ones instead of separating all the atoms, i am not a chemist.
      A pesticide that is not biodegradable is unbiodegradable because its molecular structure does not break down and change. He tries to find a fungi that will or a strain of fungi that if trained to will, break it down. 

  He puts the fungi he thinks will maybe digest some horrible substance , like pesticide or nerve gas because it dissolves other substances with the same atoms in them  into the mixture he has cooked up to feed the fungi spore he is trying to germinate in the petri dish, so that the fungi is used to the presence of the poison from birth. When the fungi has developed a bit he starts to reduce the good food in the petri dish, and increase the pesticide or whatever, every two weeks reducing the amount of food in the dish till it is, "or eat pesticide, find a way of digesting it and getting out those carbons or hydrogens, separating them from less edible atoms or die" and he has found fungi that do break that molecule so as to eat its component parts.

      You break down a pesticide molecule and you have changed its nature, detoxed it, definitively, no joke.
        He says that the tiny thin hypha fungi roots are so very many and each with a root tip that drips digesting fluids of one type or another and in this way, by trail and error, one dripping one thing and another another, they find out a mix which dissolves whatever.

    It is not just a funky it works, with Stamets trying it out it is a thing a scientist has watched happening under the microscope, it is a proved, it is a "i have done it in the petri dish and then i have tried to do the same in the open air and here are the conclusions", which could be I have done it in the petri dish and in the the open air or i still have not managed it in the open air, "take it oh government scientists and test it to see if it has draw backs", like causing cancer or overrunning  all other life on the earth or something merry of that type. agri rose macaskie.

Bill mollison says the spores from fungi are the seed the rain drops form around bringing rain or that the tiny bits of mist form around so that clouds form. I learnt in biology class, i have o level biology, that rain drops form round a mot of dust, which gives me a second source of information, a stand point from which to judge the truth of his statement.  Here they form around dust carried off from the fields. I include picture of dust full rain prints on cars in Madrid and you can tell by the colour of the dust that it is the good soil carried from of our fields. Erosion. agri rose macaskie

when we had our housefire in 2002, a friend from canada sent me a bag and a cap..the tags on the bag was infused with seeds from wildflowers..you just planted the tag and the seeds grew..so this has been around for some time..but it is a great idea..

Brenda Gross, on seeds in wasted lands,
      I once heard of garden terrorism on the telly, i am not sure that that is its name.  If you are a garden terrorist, you plant up bits of territory that aren't yours in the night. Fill your neighbors lawn with trees a bit devilish.
        The garden terrorists were planting flowers in a bit of town planners sort of planted land , a bit expensive, i find it expensive buying plants for my own garden. Paul Stamets puts mushrooms on guests hats and coats so as to turn his visitors into spreaders of fungi. Spreading stuff around  seems to be a permies activity. I heard on another occasion of people taking over bits of waste land and looking after them. I save fruit stones and pips to plant but in my own garden. Soon i will have excess trees, i already have excess succulents, at the moment i pass them on. rose macaskie.

Yeah there was a thread around here about guerilla gardening, especially parkways between sidewalks and streets, doing everything from trees to veggies.  Sounds great, but risky (for large things or odd things).

There's what I think is a guerilla garden I pass by on my lunchtime walks, where some students planted a veggie garden in an parkway right next to an alley entrance.  It looks so odd out there in the urban setting, but kinda neat!

Spreading wildflowers or mushroom spores seems much more innocuous...

    It must be more fun to plant something that looks out of place, like vegetables in a park, than wild flowers or spores.
      They plants vegetable gardens with small olive trees in them between the road and the railway line, which is a sort of no mans land, in Guadalajara capital, Spain. I like them, I love gardens with vegetables and fruit trees and a garden hut. The pity of it is, that plants grown right by the road aren't meant to be healthy. 
      In London there were places full of allotments for the people in council houses,  government subsidised housing. It is a help in bad times. Maybe allotments should be big enough to be a really big help where possible. Government allotments is a great idea. but should not replace social security.

    Another thing is the restitution of waste land, covering everything with flowers and fungi greatly improving soil quality and stopping desertification.
      Global warming  effects the poor far from us in the Bay of Bengal and in islands in the Pacific and is really more important for all of us than our present problems, important as are events that can bring lots of people to live in the street.
      Bare land warms in the sun, earth accumulates heat, if you can put vegetable matter on it, cover crops for example, that  insulate the earth you could really help.
        Now that it is hard for the earth to cool down one strategy we could have to decrease its temperature  could be to make sure it does not heat up, in the possible, then there wont be so much heat to lose. Global warming could have a really bad effect on many more people than the economic crisis is having. Worrying about allotments, before questions that influence global warming is to puttting the cart before the horse.    agri Rose macaskie.

Leah Sattler wrote:
cynical me is immediatly put off by the term detox. which has no real scientific definition and is associated with gobs of pseudoscienctific claims and scams....

I disagree.  While some people use that term in a non-specific way, and it has been associated with various scams, it is a perfectly good word when used appropriately.   If a site has 1400 parts per million of toxic bunker fuel in the soil, and we do something that breaks most of that down into carbon dioxide and water, we can fairly call it detoxification.

Here are some scientific studies that use the term 'detoxification' in an appropriate way, similar to the way it was used above :

Detoxification of Polychlorinated Dioxins via Bioremediation
Bioremediation of Atrazine-Contaminated Soil by Forage Grasses: Transformation, Uptake, and Detoxification
Ecological detoxification of methamidophos by earthworms in phaiozem co-contaminated with acetochlor and copper
Mechanism of hexavalent chromium detoxification by microorganisms and bioremediation application potential

that seems reasonable and defined! not the commercial detox snake oil sounding cures and potions and routines. its too bad that terms get taken over by commercial interest and start getting so flippantly used that they start sounding meaningless when they aren't. although i regularly get the flame reignited I tend to quickly abandon searches for natural remedies due to the difficulty and frustration in seperating the bunk from the real research. 

Another thing that mushrooms are good for, fighting against nematodes. Seems the little monsters can't get through the filaments to attack you tomatoes. This is the first year I am success with tomatoes, and the reason is lots of cow manure which had mushrooms in it. An organic farmer here in Costa Rica explained to me what was happening.

Can he save the Gulf Of Mexico? 

We had planned our vacation there.  Out on the water. Now it may be a cleaning vacation if any.

Bush removed what Clinton put in place to have avoided this disaster...He signed his own name with the approval of his friends.

I know, it is easier to place blame than to find solutions, but that is no help now, now we need smart positive energy.

I would like everyone to take a moment to send positive energy to Obama to make the right decisions and to pick the best experts available.

Hair booms
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=121557757860409&v=app_2373072738#!/topic.php?uid=121557757860409&topic=55 ;

Please help!

Jenifer smith , did you say hair booms hair is the stuff for picking up petrol .
Stamets has found that oystter mushrooms guzzle petrol and there is no sign of petrol in the mushrroms that grow off petrol, he had not tested them for heavy metals though.
We can't save th wild life that are swimming in it now though.
  bp were taking ages to make that metal bell they are to put over the hole. I would have thought obama can ask them to to put more men on it and build the bell quicker and make a bigger one at the same time in case the first is too  small, it looked too small to me.
  My father worked for shell , these companies are enormouse they are international and don't obey the rules of any one country . Someone said once Shell is as big as Spain, like it employs as many people world wide as there are Spaniards, its hard to believe. Companies that big can put a hundred, a thousand men on building that rusty sheet metal belll not twenty five.
        The dutch are good at wrecks, sea salvage work they have companies dedicated to it. There used to be a man called Red Adair who put out fires in oil wells and things, i don't know who taps leaky holes at the bottoom of the ocean .
      It just seems like everything is crying out, "you have to use clean energy". Alabama and also the floods.
  In a way its, "thank heveans these horrible things are happening to America and not other countries, poor ones, this way we might get seriouse about clean energy" though it makes me sad to think of the south getting al this rubbish, alabama , New Orleans is a very appealing place . Even thinking of the everglades of florida makes me not want disasters in wealthy florida. It sounds wealthy at anyrate.

         The situation has changed, before we could think to ourselves, "oh well, we would not function without oil, people would starve". Now we know we can get other things going so our unease about poisoning things has changed to the same with the knowleage that this is not essential, if only we get off on the other. There is the monetary cirsis too though. Is it time to say, "seriously Obama, do you think America can afford the wars"? there is nothing more expensive than wars .
         People better stop buying from chinese shops, or at least always say a word to them about their expansionism and attack them a bit while they buy, do a bit of  gentle thumb screwing them, for tibet and all of us, i am thinking of china because of money, if we all go down the drain we will have them rich and they are at the moment tremendously expansionist. Mongolia is half in their haands i believe, they want taiwan and if i understood it right Kazaquistan too fears them. At least they have their people all over the world so we can twist their arms through their chinese citizens abroad who earn so much money for them and people can do that, their governments don't have to, if governments did it their diplomatic situation would be difficult but if we did it it would be different.  agri rose macaskie.

Paul Stamets in the Seattle news: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013591414_mushroomguy04m.html.

A nice little primer for the general public or those who have no idea about all the applications of mushrooms, albeit a little cheeky with the references to the psychotropic kinds.

I would guess that many people end up at permaculture through the use of psychotropic mushrooms.Breaking out of consensual reality.Yay!mushrooms!

Yes, growing drugs is one path to the sort of thing that appears in organic and permaculture forums. The hippy culture was looking for cleaner ways to do things but they were also into drugs that brings the two things together sometimes. Still I am not sure about drugs taking you places, that sort of thing can take you out of sense instead of into it, what Paul Stamets does is full of sense. and take away your energy, drinking lessens you cardio vascular capacity you dont oxygenate so well the day after you have drunk a lot and that means you tire easily and do less. Taking drugs is dangerouse,  still i dont like what the sober are either. People who are against drugs and such say that those who are addicted get immoral people are  immoral anyway, have they read books on the financial crisis, talk about immorality! the financiers in all countries were doing a lot of things that were bound to get us into trouble, they were really creative about thinking of ever more ways to dish everything.
    I think that paul stamets would have been a creative guy anyway. What makes you creative? Who knows, critical parents that have you busting yourself to show your worth, and that in your family creativity is appreciated, maybe, for example, different families admire different qualities it could just as well be being steady or being able to twist others round your little finger.
    On drugs again, the good and bad, what about the terrible situation in the town of Suarez? Hippies would not want to cause the sort of problems that exist there now, so drugs are problematic in variouse ways. 
    Here where Catholiccs are trying to take back the country, they only talk of the negative side of hippies not the positive ones it is a pity, better hippies than the new super agressive idealogies that apporeciate the most  efficient and worldy among us who have have broken all the countries.  agri rose macaskie.

I agree with you very much rose! There are so many narrow minded views about "druggies" by a society that cannot concede to common sense and respect a person enough to let them decide what they want to put into their bodies.

Drugs -can be- dangerous. Many are not, even when used in excess amounts. Some are dangerous even when used in miniscule amounts; pharmaceuticals.

I can say that as a 24 year old, I have had my days of immorality and they surely were not caused by drugs. In fact, some mind opening drugs are the reason I am on my path to getting off this horrible pharmaceutical; Suboxone. It is an unbelievably strong opioid that I am on only since my youth of messing with other doctor prescribed drugs like Oxycontin. Right now I have a throbbing headache and I've had diarrhea all day not to mention my anxiety is through the roof. No fun.  ops:

Anywho, Paul Stamets does remind me greatly of Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead. They almost look the same and are both about some very Earthy Good Vibes! haha

Drugs dont make a person creative, being original does.